


the future burned for fuel

by cordialcount



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: Generously Seasoned with Alternian Misery, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-09 18:03:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12281691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: Xefros helps Dammek with the revolution; the revolution does not help Dammek with Xefros."Please come home," says the voice behind you. Xefros' butler training is incomplete: his footfalls provide no warning, and his vowels echo strangely off the silhouettes of Tenzen's hive. Were he anyone but your moirail the startled upswing of your bayonifle would have sheared his horns, but two sweeps with this boy have taught you to miss him.





	the future burned for fuel

hemoAnonymous [HA] began reducing information inequality with  calamariCook [CC]  
HA: how do you stand typing like this do you believe us vulnerable to punctuation  
HA: tenzen ulkeat yellowblood six sweeps collateral damage to subjugglator unchristening rites  
HA: progress made tetrarch they bothered to lie  
HA: ha

"Please come home," says the voice behind you. Xefros' butler training is incomplete: his footfalls provide no warning, and his vowels echo strangely off the silhouettes of Tenzen's hive. Were he anyone but your moirail the startled upswing of your bayonifle would have sheared his horns, but two sweeps with this boy have taught you to miss him. "Dammek, she's dead."

Your laser pointer picks out a trail of broken grubcakes, beady and golden, leading to the head in your hands. Visually there is little difference between the grubcakes and the blood. "As though I did not know!" you say. "Tell me for how _long_."

(Practical Learning Module Sixteen for A/Inspiring Janitorturers, How to Clean Up After Highbloods, subtitle: Parasite Concerns in Shared Goods, Such as Game Grubs, Faygo Syringes, and Deteriorating Victims at Varying Ages. Earth-colored scraps of clothing had littered Xefros' hive like autumn leaves.)

Xefros folds himself over your shoulder. Breath wobbly at your ear, he tugs up what remains of Tenzen by her flat, round-tipped horns. At least you no longer have those horns poking into your leg, which uncomfortably reminded you of a wriggler jab-a-long with creamsicle sticks. "It's hard to tell exactly," he says. You watch him scan the face with his fingers. He twitches, joint and claw, over the bits that make it hard to tell. "I think she wasn't, um, gone until after sundown. If you didn't have to ride here from the game, you could have—"

"Winged my lusus and flown her from the subjuggulators into the sunrise? I would be with her, right here." You are aware your voice is pitiless; for once you have reserved all your pity for yourself. But you tap your claws to Xefros' forehead, and draw the diamond up through his hair.

Every other word from him afterward is "Sorry". You smear your hand over his nose. The pap is to Xefros as the off switch to a machine; a last exhale and he goes helpfully silent.

You need both aural channels and all of your mind's attention besides to track the blurry distress, the psychic equivalent of an oil spill, you're sensing from the floor above. A lockgrub. Your shoulders fall in so suddenly Xefros upends into the your lap. You would never laugh at the hemotyranny—but to think they killed a troll for something they didn't bother to find. "Faster now," you say. You leg it upstairs.

After some red herrings ("Xciting," you hear once, before the meaty thunk that indicates Xefros has remembered why you two are here and applied his fist to his forehead), you discover Tenzen did not have two dish soaping rack devices. She had one dish soaping rack device, parallel-stacked and as gleaming as any Xefros has ever used, and an amalgam of plates and slime even you consider filthy, held up as much by its congealed contents as its shell. To your relief, the plumbing for the latter is both false and disconnected. You point Xefros at it. He buckles for a moment as his power grinds the pipes apart. 

The lockgrub drops neatly onto your foot. Its scales are the same old-ring yellow as half the downstairs floor. "Blood locked," you say, hoisting it by its tail and captchaloguing it to stop it from treating you as a fatal snack. Xefros glances at your stained boots. "Not like that, it has to be sucked out of a living troll, who knows how they bred these things to be pickier than rainbow—"

"The parasites rely on oxygenated antigen binding with," Xefros advises you, followed by the highest syllabic density you have ever heard from him in your life. "I'm sorry, Tetrarch."

"—drinkers—oh." Module Sixteen, you remind yourself, you are not _surprised_. "But there's a method, a temporary implantation to bind whatever you just said to fresh parasites with the right markers. The papers are locked to indigo and up—" you pause.

"Only trolls who won't have any reason to use it?" Xefros guesses. You pop him your fangs.

"We'll need a lot of her blood," you say.

The finicky part will come later: the boiling you can smell, clearly, over even the regular notes of your kitchen; distillation; titration, with chemicals neither of you can name and certainly neither of you are allowed to know. For now you crunch back to your raw material, consider Tenzen's jars of sauces and homemade honey, and empty the honey into a closet. Your bayonifle comes in handy, after all. For an hour you and Xefros work in anchoring silence. You reduce a friend to one constituent part. Xefros looks better, you think, occupied, his horns down-angled and gorgeous as a bulletrina in first. 

You might also look better occupied if you didn't collect these shades and splatterproof beastskin jackets for the express purpose of looking invulnerable all the time.

Finally you hold a completed jar up to the arriving light. "Hey," Xefros says. So tender a sound can only launch a pap.

"Fuck," you say. "Fuck. Fuck."

 

* * *

 

At first everything was easy. 

You were a gangly wriggler with wriggler dreams, the beginnings of an attitude jutting out of your mouth alongside too many teeth, and a stack of acoustic discs that no one listened to past the opening basslines, long before they became gutsy. Xefros had acquired some psychic muscles from stickball but no idea how to use them while not being pelted from fifty feet up. When, high off iteration v0.0321d6 of shamSecurity(), you bullied him into song, each note rung so perfectly horribly he magnetized your spongeclots. You knocked him into—perhaps partly through—the wall to shut him up. He stared. His arms opened right up instead of blocking, ripping open your arteries, anything, exposing a warm round neck blotched cantaloupe to maroon by injuries from mere _sports_.

You pitied him so badly you started crafting his mic that very night. Within a perigee your life had scoped out a single priority. How blissful simplicity was: to know, always, the one that matters, to be able to commit as little to anyone or anything else as a coward. 

Those cull-me-easy arms should have lit up your whole switchboard of warnings. You would say goodbye to Xefros' smearspinners and dustchasers, lined up behind him, as often as Xefros himself; in his sterile corridors it was so easy to imagine yourself unpackaging his heart and unraveling his innards and suturing yourself inside. Practically romcom sentiment, never suffer your moirail hurting themselves on anything but you—but Xefros let you when he was hardly pale as dusk or dawn. Fresh from the grubhood caves, you'd gaped as the Heiress was boosted cloud high on your new mass schoolfeeding device, her shadow thrown through a circle of lowblood telekinetics installed neat as a crown. You'd already hated the idea of things in their places. Trizza Peixes tangles skull chimes in six or eight windows. She hashes up subgrubs like Prongle passwords. The sheer insolence of disorder: by your first sweep you understood the ultimate privilege of the Heiress, to be able to sweep through a room or an empire knowing the mess was someone else's to clean up.

More than anything, as you grew, you craved the reassurance that you were dangerous, you were prepared, you were not easy. _You_ cannot become so many pixels strewn through the backdrop of Trizza's manicures. Xefros is more scared for you than of you, and he is the only troll in the world from whom you still accept this.

It drives you batshit that Xefros, pisspoor stickballer, sweet as sugar, has never tried to fight you despite growing to double your size. As your rebellion developed from a lyrical device into an absurdity of flesh, blood, and strategic fronding, you said, _Xefros, why don't you take up infiltration? It'll keep you safe until you can deal with more_ , and then Xefros actually learned how to use eighteen types of spoons. _If you're going to serve this clownshit of a society, you should serve me too_ , you said. The sarcasm slid right off the meticulously deplaqued gleam of his poor edgeless gums. At least his dinners were delicious.

You are easy! You are distressingly easy, it turns out: you remember sprawling elbow to elbow on his lawnring. You'd pined together over the lead guitarsonist of Green Blood. You thought he had the most anguished chord picking of all time and Xefros thought he had the most anguish-worthy mouth, but you remember _I can't send him a_ spade, _Dammek, I'm not brave like you_ , and pity for his terrible opinions, his nerves, his—everything he doesn't want to make of himself overcomes you, pale as snow. Let him fight nothing, you think. You'll bring down the hives and ships and fishy nightmares so he can grin like he won't be ghosted to scrub his own entrails off the wall.

The lowblood moirail of a highblood traitor will hang for culpability. The lowblood moirail of a lowblood is merely culled for gross stupidity. When did that simple truth begin to consume you?

 

* * *

 

Evening in Centercliff. Caqtum Traifo's hive glitters even by the standards of Thrashthrust's wealthiest enclave. You suspect he invited you and Xefros both to this soirée to contrast all this conspicuous exhibitionism and gold, as directly renting lowbloods for decoration is tacky.

It is, however, not tacky to install a giant grill facing Outglut, positioned so that if Trizza sets your neighbors on fire again the blown smoke will flavor his grubs. Xefros shivers behind it. You glance over the unhappy tuck of his arms and shrug off your jacket. His blood's lower than yours, a thorn in winter. Of course the cold will also force you to head inside, but you are here to negotiate with a rebel comrade! Of course you are eager to advance your cause.

"How could I not invite you?" Caqtum says, once you've convinced your heart to sit tight beneath your ribs and allowed his clawshake. He passes his palm over your eyes: a traditional courtesy, to pretend you such close friends you would spend time together in the dark. "What a picture of calm you are! How I admire that."

You precisely tuned your shades' opacity to disguise the width of your pupils, while revealing enough of your ocular socket to demonstrate you haven't cached an Abysmal Visual, your current favorite bomb. You choose to believe Caqtum's referring to your shades. "You mentioned you had a grub problem."

"Ah, yes, your job," he says. Even as a cover, grub techsnickcian doesn't really merit this warm condescension.

You lean in; you hope it'll be read by nearby trolls as concupiscent reciprocation, and not conspiratorial. "Can we cut to it? The probability of my moirail blabbing everything we've got is rising by the second."

He leads you to a cramped lab. It's smaller than your respiteblock despite the endless bowels of his hive you've walked with his claws chilly on your shoulder, and not hexagonal—fucking indigobloods, they're always socialized with a hint of perversion but rarely enough that you can blackmail them with it. He passes you a vial under the pretense of directing you in some elementary reprogramming. It's the completed infusion for Tenzen's lockgrub. He lets you captchalogue it and back out halfway to the door before he speaks. "A moment, Tetrarch."

"Thanks for your help," you say. "You'll rock the new non-capitalistic world order."

"Go flushed for him," he says, and you hate the way your response feels bred into you, that up-on-your-haunches attention a highblood's voice squeezes from you like marrow. "If you truly pity him, but we can discuss that in a civilized pile. Guns or cartridges, whatever you're fond of." 

He's come so close you feel the shifting air as he folds his teeth neatly under his lips, a distinctive overture, neither flushed nor black. Your mind rises from your frozen carapace. In unison, the grubs along the shelves begin to squeal.

"I would rather pail a drone than my moirail. I would rather pap a drone than you," you say. You are trying to focus on the explosive strain of bees you've found along the wall, and your mouth has its habits.

You wait. You do not die. Caqtum just places his hand an inch from your face—gives you a long breath to think about what he could do, but is graciously not doing—and kneads the air between his fingers.

"Do you know how it works, your blood solution? While it's in you, it alters more than blood. It touches your psionics. Did you think those trifling security programs of yours fooled me? It's clear to anyone who knows you that you don't trust code however passable your skill, you trust your grubwork. For sixty or eighty seconds it will take your powers and replace them, and not always will you get your own back. Sometimes it burns them all out. I do hope it burns out yours.

"And when it does," he finishes, claws hovering showily over your neck, "I'll still be pale for you. Come and find me, Tetrarch. This rebellion of _mine_ could always use your reins."

You set the bees loose. You do not wait to see how accurately you have aimed. As you have no hope of navigating back to the party without Caqtum you bolt as far as your airpushers can take, crack a window, and summon your lusus.

"Are you okay?" Xefros asks, when you've locked yourself into his kitchen. His lusus noses at your boot, splashed with Caqtum's wine. Of all of tonight's events this makes you sit your ass on Xefros' beautiful pristine floor and shove your knuckles into your eyeballs.

"I got what we needed," you say.

"This revolution thing is burning you out," he says—unconscious echo, but you tense like a mathematical object. You focus on the licks of his hair, disheveled by the wind. "Tetrarch, what do you think will be left of you when you're done?"

Your grimalkin's strength is bright in your head. You heave yourself up. _Come on_ , you think, and in place of your sanity and self-restraint you steal all of your lusus's. His first kick goes through most of Xefros' cabinets. The second handily smashes all the rest, the bowls, Cruel-aid mixes, study manuals, crackling pyramids of posters, the precious dish soaping rack device, and your hoarded pallet of Lucky Harms, which showers both of you in a sticky rainbow mess like a parody of intra-hemospectrum war. Your lusus turns to Xefros himself, unhinges his jaw. It's a second before Xefros, sunken-eyed and trembling, gathers his own psionics and gently corrals your lusus into the wall.

Though you do not deserve it, he shushes you.

His fingers skim over your cheekbone. He, too, is quelled: with this exactitude he could be shaving off the marshmallows with his clawtips. There's a rhythm to it, and after a while, if you could think, you think you could work the progression of muscle groups slackening in your face into meter. Xefros could probably even sing to it. These days his voice is tolerable at ninety decibels, considering the Grubbles' degree of cullworthiness has no correlation with his pitch quality. Any softer and it slinks right into you; fated, you think, your head quiet and useful but for this boy whose stammers and "Troll Conquete Du Pain? Sorry, you read it so nicely..." shoves you willingly to your knees.

"Stuff's rotten," he says—you can almost see the X. "But... being angry won't make you a highblood, Dammek."

You bump his forehead with your own. For a moment you do not want his understanding, the intermittent perfection of which bears down on you like pain; you want animal comfort. You want there to not be a distance between the pity you feel for him and the pity he feels for you, or perhaps not to have to pity anyone at all. What you have: Xefros crouches by you and you feel his pulse match yours as he nestles his head into your throat, horns glossy across your lips, lays all his weight across you until there is nothing in you that moves.

 

* * *

 

Christmas arrives too soon. It only takes you six minutes to finish the requisite grovel for the rest of your sorry life, so you have a very long time to stare blankly at your Snake rebugger while your mass schoolfeeding device eats away the remains of your wits. The newscutters can never decide between lowblood interest, respectable troll interest, and universal full-terror veneration. Today they're showing, in the Troll Solomon tradition of tossing conflicting interests in a blender, the Heiress painting (°ㅂ°╬) onto the Last Light You Suckas Will Ever See with a nauseatingly neon mash of seadweller bile while a mustardblood slowly asphyxiates beneath her heel. #slay, #best lay off the land, etcetera. If Falseternia Today were subtle it would not be staffed by ghosts.

Xefros scoots next to you on your loungeplank. "Eggnog, Tetrarch?"

You taste it. "Ugh, be civilized," you say. If the eggs he used were even a month old you will eat your schoolfeeding device. When you smear the balance up his arm the trail of slime it leaves is insultingly thin. He doesn't even dodge!

"Hey, don't slime my uniform?" He curls up, knees to belly. 

This confuses you until you remember you last saved him from stickball by trapping him and rolling him into his recuperacoon: he'd scraped both elbows on a doorframe. "Go play your wriggler game," you say. You pet him perfunctorily on one horn.

And you abscond. You've had your daily quota of eggs; you let go of your pretenses, and you brood.

You ensconce yourself in a nest of cables under your desk. _Looks like a helmsblock_ , Xefros had said the first time he saw you there, with a faintly vinegary undertone to his voice that wasn't quite horror. By now you've decided you like the word: from here you pilot the rebellion. Grubs knot densely from your navel to between your toes. You've left their tails wired into your computer, to give any watchers something they think they can see; but a perigree's coaxing of a bored scienterrorist had the gradients in their bellies redesigned to feed nothing of value up. You trust guns to shoot bullets. Caqtum was, unfortunately, right, in that you do not trust anything that shoots data anywhere but the warm veins of your mind.

(He was also right about one specific grub. He was right that you do not trust yourself to use it. Your claws clink on the vial like chains.)

Anyway, there's other useful work to do. You watch the artfully jpeg'd video Trizza has just posted of her crushing a cell of your comrades. You have started to suspect she's pitching black for you—Trizza doesn't devote so much intent, so much precision of timing, to anything but memes and flirting. Fuck her self-importance! You look instead at your remaining cells. You look at leads. You follow trails marked by coverups: the suspicious declines in rates for culling and insubordination, like holes graphed on a contour map. 

You do not think that in this war of attrition you are bound to lose unless you fight with something much bigger than yourself, and you do not think that you are too terrified to give yourself up for the only such thing you have glimpsed. You do not think about Xefros, for whom you once claimed you would give up anything. You are not terrified of the troll you were when you said this, and you are not terrified you are no longer that same troll now.

By the time Xefros returns you have capped and uncapped the vial sixteen times. He finds you lying, flat, on the floor covering thatch, face pressed against the vial—cool and closed, but the odor has so strongly impressed itself upon your nostrils you could not forget it had Xefros played the whole season. Even Xefros' nose wrinkles, snowballing the little beads of his sweat. "What are you doing?"

"Not doing," you say, accurately. Perhaps inhalation alone has already implanted something of Tenzen. She had been cuttingly honest to the end, and no one could have closed her mouth but to kiss it; perhaps that's why you ask your moirail, "Xef, would you pity me if I did nothing? If I was no one?"

"Dammek," Xefros says, "I don't care. You have to fight everything to feel worthy of pitying me, I know, but that's not how I... I'm not going to take my feelings back if you're less cool, yeah? I just need you to be here." He looks, briefly, hooked, eyes protuberant as a fish's. "I need to—sorry—"

Not like you don't remember how strong Xefros is; his uniform has split all down his left, uncovering flat undulations of muscle you could envy in another quadrant. But you've always thought him an easy cull, and he knocks into you to your total surprise, like you're being snared from sleep. The ensuing tussle does not have two active participants so much as a boxer and a sandbag. Somehow Xefros' grab for the vial catches on one of your horns as you haul yourself halfway sitting; you can practically feel the glass shimmer as it suspends in the air, arcs down, and shatters.

"I need to," Xefros repeats, and he scores his arm open with your own claws and jams the wound into the pooling slime, the one long charged movement of a cuebat swing. His face seizes up. You are making a noise halfway between _Fuck you_ and _Fuck me_ , your fingers cradled all around his skull as his eyes flare and shut. Then Xefros lifts your entire body in a ritzy golden net of psionics and flips you over, no color he had before, with none of his prior effort. "Oh wow," he says.

Sixty or eighty seconds; you decaptchalogue the lockgrub. It nibbles at Xefros' wrist, rolls over in your hand like it needs to ponder its last meal, and vomits up what looks like a sheet of baslignin crumpled around another grub before summarily exploding. The resulting grub slop renders the handwriting rather less legible, but you and Xefros pluck bits off with your claws until you can make out a weapqn fqr tre rigrt pla(e aud rigrt tiwe.

Xefros squirms. You recognize the particular wriggle of his shoulders. You are beyond relieved. "Should I?"

"I'm as anxious to see you risk your mind for an actual secret as a silly matryoshka exercise," you say. The X's roll out clean and crisp.

Lockgrub two contains a code: you recognize in it the repeated matrices of circuitry, but the rest will have to wait for you to run it and build whatever it specs. Xefros is shivering as the thin tickle of blood at his mouth turns the familiar shade of rust. 

"I think this proves I'm a bad moirail," he says. "Sorry, I should have just stopped you, right?"

You knock your shades off in the desperate need to mash your nose between his horns. "You are the most awful," you say, browbone to browbone, "I could never hold you in contempt. I could never feel anything for you but pity, you magnificent idiot."

He looks at you with his tremulous smile. He is beyond your belief: but his horns are flawless and warm under your hand as you stroke with all the gentleness you can borrow, all the gratitude you can keep. You say, "I'm sorry," into the storm's-eye silence, and he sighs and tells you _It doesn't sound right from you, but—it's still what I wanted to hear._


End file.
